


Purple, Effervescing, Sick

by fashionablesnider



Category: Borderlands (Video Games)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angel (Borderlands) Lives, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Sexual Assault, It Was 4AM And I Was In One Of Those Moods Fic, Light Angst, Non-Canonical Character Death, Short One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-14
Updated: 2017-05-14
Packaged: 2018-10-31 16:43:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,636
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10903371
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fashionablesnider/pseuds/fashionablesnider
Summary: Pre-BL2 Canon Divergence. Jack's dead. Nisha finds out about Angel; shoots him in the skull. Timothy helps her carry Angel off of Helios station piggy-back style while they run for their collective lives, and after their escape shuttle lands, Athena drives out to this remote corner of the Pandoran wastes to chauffer the three of them somewhere they might not die of dehydration and exposure. We go from there.





	Purple, Effervescing, Sick

**Author's Note:**

> It's a recovering-from-PTSD-nightmares-in-the-early morning fic. I like to think it's relatively lighthearted considering, but, you know. Fair content warning for discussions of (C)SA/rape/incestuous abuse, as well as drug use (re: very brief smoking). 
> 
> Nisha's not moral by any stretch of the word, but I do think that abusing one's own child is something she cannot let slide. The revelation about Jack is a huge betrayal of her trust. Angel's like 13 here.

They've been driving for a couple of hours when Timothy finally calms down enough to start working his way back into a more private fear. Exchanges the short-term panic for the long-form _God, what now?_

Angel's asleep with her head on his lap, twitching and breathing unsteady. He cards through her thinning hair, gentle so as to keep it from falling out between his fingers. She's pale. Sick and stiff and undernourished, unused to the world outside her chambers; and without her cords and wires, the implanted dents on the side of her skull glow an eridium-bloomed purple next to irritated red. Timothy is not looking forward to the detox, if she's alive to see it through.

He sighs. Looks to her arms curled up against her chest, swirling blue markings speckled with her father's blood.

Her _late_ father is the driving force behind his current anxiety, as well as a more chronic case for at least half the van’s occupants. Hyperion is full of obsession and false-god, self-sacrificial worship – Jack’s legacy in hot pursuit – but it’s not that which frightens him. Timothy frets over the horrible private parts, the silenced traumas, and frets because he looks at Angel with the most terrible thought: _Hello. Are you like me?_

He is scared, so scared, that Jack has done the same to her. Knowing from her age and circumstance that it is much worse than the same. And so, perhaps in an effort to shift the focus of torture away from a child, he's time traveling. No sound, almost controlled. But he's stuck there in his visions, and he breathes shallow with his eye glazed over until Athena, from behind the wheel, asks:

“What are you thinking about?”

“Violence,” Nisha mutters out the window beside him. “Not the fun kind. Wish I'd had the time to choke it out of him.” She's struggling to restrain her bite, voice husky with an exhausted sort of anger, when an emotion draws its strength out from the body.

“Understandable,” says Athena. After the what-who-how, the silence fell on the lot of them like an anvil. Athena seeks to keep their little collective grounded, rather than spark conversation. “Timothy?”

There's a lag between his name and his recognition of self. He blinks rapidly a few times and makes a noise, “Oh. Huh?”

“Are you doing okay? Feeling all of your limbs?”

“Uh, kinda out of it. I think I'm thinking too hard.”

“Save it for Hollow Point,” Athena tells him. “I want you sewn up and hydrated before you make any more major decisions.”

“I can handle a few bullet holes by myself,” Nisha scoffs, scoping in down the desert stretch of dust and red behind them.

“Still doesn't hurt to check in with a qualified doctor, once or twice in your life,” Athena says.

“Yeah, whatever.”

Timothy remembers the surgery wing on Helios. His face stings. The brand is far enough healed that it's not in constant pain, but he's had sweat and tears and knuckles in and around it recently. It's angriest where it rips through his dead eye and skirts the edge of the sighted one. He puts a dusty, bloodstained hand to his cheek and pushes up against the scar tissue, feeling the imprint of a hotter, burning ghost pain. That, and Jack holding him down. One of the worst things he ever felt. The imagery repeats itself.

“I'm just thinking,” he says aloud, low enough to remove most of the shake.

“About?” Athena asks.

“I'm looking at this kid,” Timothy says, now pushing under Angel's side-swept fringe to press his palm against the sick heat of her forehead. Lower still, almost muffled, “And thinking about the time her dad raped me over his desk.”

It's intended to be nonchalant. That's how he always does, with heavy subjects.

Athena's hands clench on the steering wheel, and before she can respond Nisha lets out an honest-to-God snarl-into-a-scream as she sticks her entire upper body out of the van and blows a skag's head inside out. “God damn it, god fucking damn it--”

“Was that like, the worst possible way I could have said that?”

“It was severe,” says Athena, through gritted teeth. She’s not angry at him. “Though I appreciate you feeling safe enough to say so.” In her programmed, distant, over-caring tone from days spent stitching up his buzz-axe wounds and otherwise mother-henning, she says, “I shouldn't have left Helios when I did. I'm sorry.”

Nisha's muttering under her breath, wasting ammunition on anything that'll take it. The problem with Jack’s death being so quick is that she’s still filled with murderous energy. Timothy can feel, from the tension emanating off of her in waves, how badly she wanted to drag it out and make him pay for all he’d done before the end. Shattering rocks and bandit skulls they pass just isn’t enough to compensate

“I'm over it,” Timothy lies. “Mostly. Not your fault. It’s Angel I’m worried about; I’m still not sure he didn’t hurt her like that, on top of all the rest.”

Athena’s face tightens, and he can hear it in her infections. “I experienced something similar, as a girl. You really believe Jack would do that to a child?”

“He did pretty much everything else.” Timothy's words come out with a sharp sigh. Angel breathes in soft little snores beside him. “And there are these little things, innocuous stuff that upsets her, and-- and what he used to... make me call him. God. I don't know. I could be wrong. This is so messed up. Feel like I'm going to wake up this morning and have to do it all again, except it's real so, you know, we fuck up and die instead of whatever this is.” When her show of solidarity sinks in, he sourly adds, “What you went through sucks, Athena. Like, I wasn't here for Atlas' reign, but I'm glad you took them all out.”

"I appreciate the sentiment,” she says, solemn. “I wish I could tell you how to better handle the emotions that come with this, but my path to closure was primarily focused on decapitation. Which is not an option now.”

“Mhm,” is the noise Timothy makes, failing now to suppress his teary wobble. “No more violence, I just... I hate it here. So much. This planet traumatises everyone on it, or near it, and it _sucks_ , and I--”

“You wanna go home?” Nisha says, bitter. She’s echoing the words from a breakdown or five he'd had on Elpis, at the beginning of all this.

“I just want to go,” he mumbles, because there's no home anymore. “Somewhere not Pandora.”

“Start a farm on Eden-3?” Athena says, with a small smile in her voice.

"Hyeah," Timothy laughs, wiping the one eye with functioning tear ducts. "Sorry for being such a downer."

There's the clicking of a lighter as Nisha grabs herself a cigarette, gesturing the pack at the other two, who shake their heads negative. “Hey, grave circumstance and all.”

The ashes cascade out behind them into the cloud of dust as Nisha shakes them out the window. Timothy’s mind goes to Jack burning up in fire; wonders if the guy even wrote himself a will somewhere in between his immortality complex, and almost snorts laughing to himself.

In some time, Hollow Point closes in on them like a giant maw on the horizon, swallowing Athena's van into damp, protective darkness. Nisha rouses Timothy with a flick to the forehead -- apparently this kind of emotional bomb and shatter is physically exhausting -- and he in turn wakes Angel slowly and gently, pushing his voice higher into his nose so he’s recognisable. As he's helping her out of the vehicle and onto terra firma, one Janey Springs hurries out from the mechanic's with a makeshift wheelchair. Angel is all whispered thank yous; quiet, shell-shocked gratitude.

'Dank' is a pretty apt description of the city. What first seems like raindrops on Timothy's skin is actually cave water dripping from stalactites far above. Hollow Point full of thieves, cons, and folks with a penchant for needless violence, nothing less than what he's come to expect of Pandoran settlements. Anything below our corporate overlords, the people are dirt-poor and desperate. Of course they are. Timothy's done worse than swindle for a buck.

But the darkness and jagged dome walls on all sides are a welcome security, rather than claustrophobia. After everyone’s through with their medical check-ups and Timothy's had a bullet or two dug out of his thighs, Athena and Janey are kind enough to house him -- and Angel too, of course -- until he has enough of his mind and health back to figure out where to go from here. Nisha's staying at a motel about as secure as the glue beneath his flaking fake fingernails. Determined to be just fine on her own, with a combination of pride and actual self-resourcefulness. She needs the alone time, at least. For now, the relative calm is about fifteen weights off Timothy's shoulders.

All four of them -- he, Athena, Angel and Springs -- are sprawled across the tiny living room, half on the furniture and half on the floor, with an old board game and mugs of steaming hot cocoa all around. Angel was sick on the pavement on the way -- watery, purple, effervescing sick. But now she's drinking; giggling and smiling with her legs tucked beneath her on the couch and the spare blanket drawn over her tiny body like a cloak. Tim rubs his hand across the bullet wounds on his leg as a reminder that yes, he's awake, and they're here. Not on Helios. Together. When he'd been halfway certain neither of them would make it to the end of the year.

Like a miracle, if they were called Nisha Kadam.


End file.
